Open data gurus share best practices -- GCN

"In honor of Data Innovation Day the city of Philadelphia released a guidebook to provide advice and information to city departments and agencies on releasing open data. The city’s Open Data Guidebook offers suggestions on reviewing data for completeness and accuracy, adding metadata components and terms of use as well as staging the data and using application programming interfaces.  Like Philadelphia, many cities, states and localities have been able to run their own open data efforts. Gainesville, Fla., for example, launched its Open Data portal, which allows the public to access information ranging from city budgets to its utility consumption.  Other government offices have found partners to help them make more data available to users both within and outside government. Cook County, Ill., signed an agreement with the Smart Chicago Collaborative to help county agencies to develop and identify new data sets to publish, prepare the county’s data and post it on a public website, according to a post on the Cook County blog.  Smart Chicago also will help create visuals, infographics and other Web-based content to make it easier for government officials and residents to understand how the county is performing ..."